Background: In pediatric general anesthesia, our goal should be quicker extubation to facilitate rapid turnover in the operating room without compromising on safety and quality of anesthesia. Although many studies have focused on improving safety and pursuing a higher quality of recovery, factors related to anesthesia emergence remain unclear. We must, therefore, identify factors that influence the process of emergence from general anesthesia in children.
Findings: We retrospectively examined 148 children (aged 1-6 years, American Society of Anesthesiologists physical status: 1-2) who had undergone <2 h of ambulatory surgery. Clinical measures included time from the end of surgery to extubation (extubation time), age, height, weight, surgical time, mean indirect blood pressure during surgery, mean heart rate during surgery, mean end-tidal carbon dioxide during surgery (mETCO2), mean body temperature during surgery (mBT), and total amount of fentanyl. Anesthetic procedures involved sevoflurane or propofol. Multiple regression analysis revealed that mETCO2 (p < 0.01) and mBT (p < 0.01) were independent clinical factors associated with extubation time following pediatric ambulatory surgery.
Conclusions: This study of 148 pediatric patients demonstrated that anesthesia emergence may be associated with mBT and mETCO2 following pediatric ambulatory surgery. These results show that perioperative vital signs are important in the prevention of delayed emergence for pediatric patients.
Keywords: Emergence; Hypercapnia; Hypothermia; Pediatric ambulatory surgery.